Let’s run away and join the circus.
Glendale resident Lee Purtill is a muti-hyphenate novelist-dancer-choreographer who can’t keep out of mischief. Her new production, The Circus of Worldly Wonders, A Steampunk Ballet, is the fresh batch of dance-fantasy from the irrepressible Purtill’s creative cookie jar, where the treats are surprising, surreal, and deliciously subversive.
“The Circus of Worldly Wonders” is the company’s newest original ballet since 2023’s “Cracked,” Purtill’s goofy-Goth twist on that ol’ slow-roasted Tchaikovsky holiday chestnut. Purtill says that “This show has been gestating for over 10 years, beginning life as a novel then as a single dance early in the pandemic with everyone in their Zoom boxes, then graduating to an online-only performance combining remote dancers in their homes across the country with in-person dancers in Griffith Park.”
Artificial Flowers, a 1961 Bobby Darin hit, provides unexpected inspo for Purtill. The glitzy, major-key arrangement is pure Vegas, with lots of jubilant brass and swinging strings, an almost cruelly ironic counterpoint to the story line: Annie, age nine, is orphaned, and makes artificial flowers for ladies’ hats until, as the song says, her fingers are numb. Annie freezes to death in her tenement room, covered with ice and surrounded by her faux blossoms which have been “…watered with her tears.”
“I love a good upbeat, dark story,” says Purtill, who also cites the legend of The Little Matchstick Girl and Ray Bradbury’s classic tale of a sinister traveling medicine show “Something Wicked This Way Comes” as well as his “The Illustrated Man” as further creative influences.
“The circus always has this dark undercurrent, which is why people are afraid of clowns,” says Purtill. “By using the vocabulary of steampunk, with gears and cogs and mechanization, 19th century industrial revolution influences, we create a carnival reality that’s even more fantastical than any circus of past generations.”
Lee Purtill adds, “I want to look at technology as beneficial, and I want to show an audience that everyone is special. And that means that they, too are special.”
A constant in Purtill’s vision, however, equally present in Tod Browning’s 1932 quasi-documentary “Freaks,” to the 1960s with Fellini’s “La Strada,” or “Carnival of Souls,” to 1980’s Carny with Jodie Foster and Gary Busey, is a quest for essential authenticity, acted out by loners and misfits who don’t seem to belong anywhere excerpt in the strange, self-styled families they fashion out of their alienation from the mainstream.
Purtill says, “I grew up moving around a lot, and I liked that. I didn’t crave settling down, just like I never felt at home in the corporate world, although I had professional success there. I call this my ‘fear of furniture.’”
Purtill’s ornery, nonconformist streak is evidenced by her brand mantra: ballet for every body (four words). Her performing company represents players who are the antithesis of the unforgiving balletic physical ideal, in addition to a handful of tall, slender, long-limbed dancers. The excruciating criteria of the form’s past have been shed, and what emerges on Purtill’s stage is electrifyingly real.
We dropped in at Purtill’s La Cañada Flintridge studio on a recent Sunday to see if any of the stardust would land on us. Mingling with the cast amidst sequin-sewing and tutu-fitting, we learned the basic plot of “The Circus of Worldly Wonders.”
No spoilers, but it’s the story of a wounded protagonist who is repaired and redeemed by her own truth, ending with a sharp twist worthy of any Greek myth. The plot includes lots of lightning-strikes.
In the context of the ballet, natural, organic characters, notably Painted Ladies adorned in tattoos, share dramatic space with other beings who are mechanically enhanced by steampunk innovation, including rescued swans who yearn to take flight, but cannot.
Stacy Schroeder, who plays a circus Devotee in addition to handling the company’s marketing, has been dancing—ballet, tap, jazz — since she was eight years old. She and her friend Amy Taylor, also in the show, saw Purtill’s “Sweet Sorrow” (an irreverent take on “Romeo and Juliet”) and decided to audition for the company. That was before she felt the pain.
“I felt this pain in my chest, when I’d put my seat belt on in the car, just from the pressure of the strap,” says Schroeder. The pain was breast cancer, diagnosed about a year ago. She’s still doing therapy following her surgery and chemo, and returned to the company in March 2025. She says “To be able to dance again is everything. I’m not exactly like I was before, but I am getting stronger, and I just love feeling my body move.”
Taylor plays a Mermaid in Purtill’s production and says, “I love dance because it’s both an art form, and an athletic form,” as Schroeder applies tiny jewels to the bridge of her nose with eyelash glue, accenting her cheekbones which have been brushed with turquoise and teal powder using a fish-scale stencil. A thick ponytail of braided pastel hair extensions finishes her look as one of the sea-sirens who Purtill describes as “…creatures that have been saved from extinction, alternately vainglorious and skittish, they try to entice humans into trading places with them, knowing the humans could not possibly live underwater with them.”
Caitlin Scott plays a mechanical Swan with silvered, clockwork wings that smell of fresh spray-paint the morning of our visit. Scott, who played an evil Raven in a previous Purtill production, discovered competitive ballroom dancing while in graduate school and now says that she “… found out that dancing as a form of acting allows me to step into different stories.” She describes her current character as “an elegant, prissy swan,” explaining the Edwardian industrial motifs require “sharper, more angular movements, more machine-like versus more flowing. I like this story for its escapism, and also because it’s about overcoming adversity.”
Elena Castellanos plays a Tightrope Walker, and she began dancing when she was three years old. She joined Lee Purtill Ballet Company in 2022. Since then, she has been featured in Purtill’s “Hotel at the End of the Universe,” “Sweet Sorrow,” and “Cracked.”
A foot injury sidelined her only briefly. “I love this kind of dance because it’s so human, so many feelings,” she says. In addition to death-defying feats on the wire (“It’s all just an illusion, en pointe!” she laughs), Castellanos designs and applies the company’s imaginative hair and makeup concepts.
Aspen Cole, who plays both a Painted Lady and a Mermaid, is untroubled by prying eyes that scan her gorgeous gallery of ink. “The tattoos are permanent,” she says. Snoopy snuggles on her instep, a hearty artichoke illustrates her left shoulder, and a vintage television set adorns her left arm. The masks of tragedy and comedy nestle at her nape. On her left thigh, Death as a swashbuckling calavera embraces a voluptuous, swooning woman. “Memento Mori, it’s a good reminder,” she says.
Cole says that her growing gallery of tatts do not portray a linear life-narrative, but rather “Really just things that I like. My mom was really into Snoopy.” From her start as a theater major, Cole found her way to pole-dancing and hoop-dancing (“Very Cirque de Soleil,” she says) and today is also prop-boss for the show.
Olivia Lomax, Mermaid-seamstress, found Purtill online during the pandemic. “My great grandma always had done crafts, and always encouraged us as kids to use our hands to make things” she says, adding a bit of Bob Mackie dazzle, a sequined scrap from a flea market find, to the hem of a fellow Mermaid’s gown. She says she rarely buys new clothes other than undies and dance togs, “Partly because disposable, fast fashion is a waste, but also because thrifted things are more interesting. For this kind of work, the thrift store always has old Prom dresses, and wedding dresses, ready to be repurposed.”
Jamie Haley, costume designer and Ringmaster’s Apprentice, arrives with what looks like the world’s largest pizza delivery container. In fact, it’s a tutu bag, containing the stiff white tulle “platter” tutu for Swan Caitlin. “It helps to be a dancer, when designing for dancers,” she says, demonstrating a split-second stretch that makes my aging tendons ache in mere witness.
A cruelty pervades the history of real circuses. While Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Universoul Circus and Cirque de Soleil have transitioned to humans-only performances, meaning no animal acts, this show features a mechanical elephant to be period-correct.
Early circuses from Rome to Beijing featured horse racing, and some, notably Roman, frothed the crowds into a frenzy with mock naval battles, mock hunts with tigers and lions, and gladiatorial contests in which plenty of real blood was spilled.
More recently, plying small towns, raunchy girly-acts which sometimes included physical contact with the audience were key to traveling sideshow ticket-sales a generation ago in America, as documented brilliantly in photographer Susan Meiselas’ “Carnival Strippers.”
Traveling shows versus the huge Coliseum spectaculars have more in common with Purtill’s vision. These often come alive most vividly at night, when flashing neon lights, the ping of air rifles, and the seemingly innocuous boop-de-boop trills of a calliope and organ electrify the air with the promise of the fleshly, the forbidden, the shocking, luring in suckers (to quote P.T. Barnum) like the hot crackle of fresh popcorn and the pink-sugar perfume of cotton candy.
Even at a G-rated carnival, sweets and treats infantilize us. Spinning, flashing lights, topsy-turvy rides, whirring motors, clanging bells, screeching whistles, funhouse mirrors serve to distort and disorient us.
Fellini fans and Jungian analysts liken attending a carnival or circus to a descent into the Guillermo del Toro-esque underworld of the Collective Unconscious, or perhaps a redux of the “Star Wars” cantina, where we encounter our unfinished psychic business in the form of all manner of half-familiar archetypal creatures, masked, mysterious, sometimes enchanting, often grotesque.
This departure from the norm and dislodging of the ego also are key to understanding the circus as a metaphor for the fleeting nature of all things. By night, clowns juggle, sword-swallowers challenge our body horror, tigers rear and snarl under the whip, and spangled girls fly through rings of fire, the gasps of the crowd audible even over the blare of the hurdy-gurdy.
And by the hard white light of dawn, they are gone. The Big Top has been collapsed and folded away, the girls and wild beasts are asleep in their wagon, nothing left except cigarette butts and a few wisps of dry hay blowing across the empty lot to suggest that the circus was ever even there at all.
Purtill’s balletic dreamscape dances on the edge of darkness, ruffling feathers gently with a whiff of terror, but bearing only the delicate memory of pain and loss, like the scar on the mended wing of a rescued flightless swan.
Of course, how close to the edge we dance is up to us.
DEETS
- The Circus of Worldly Wonders, A Steampunk Ballet
- Leigh Purtill Ballet Company
- The Lanterman Auditorium
- 4491 Cornishon Avenue, La Cañada Flintridge, 91011
- 818 -790-8880
- July 12 & 13, 7:00 PM
- Tickets here
